ondon.
Charing Cross Road. I must have walked up and down that
road two or three thousand times. Perhaps ten thousand.
Who knows? How to calculate a figure with any form of accuracy
when it traces back forty years to my early teens? Can’t
I make a stab in the dark, perhaps like Simenon when he
purported to have had sex with ten thousand women since
the age of thirteen and a half in his “need to communicate”?
A figure later reduced to around one thousand two hundred
by his second wife.

Whatever
the number, this dynamic road plays a major part in my
life, a spine to my life, as it is to
Central London. Or, alternatively, the aorta, the main artery
of the body. What image to find to equate its importance
in my life? Its vitalness. My life would have been very different
if this street hadn’t been there to support and launch
me in directions, like ribs from the spine, or vital organs
within its sphere. Walking up the Charing Cross
Road, to the left are connections to Leicester Square, Chinatown,
Soho, Oxford Street. Walking up, to the right, connections
to Covent Garden, Holborn, Bloomsbury.

Walking
up. That word suggests the bottom is at the Trafalgar Square
end. But that is only because
I come into the great metropolis from the south, arrive at
Charing Cross station, the closest station of all the main
ones to the centre of London. Thus I begin my walk from the
bottom as I know it, behind the north side of Trafalgar Square,
behind the National Gallery. That is my base, my foot for
my feet to start from. That means my head is at the top end,
Oxford Street, Tottenham Court Road, Centre Point… that
monstrous edifice to capitalism and redundancy, that blot
on the landscape. If I lived in North London and came in
from Hampstead, or Highgate, let’s say, then when I
went up the Charing Cross Road, the worst thoughts of consumerism
and capitalism would be as my base (to trample upon) and
the National Gallery as my head, somewhere in which to dream.
Now that feels better.

Perhaps
spine and artery are clichéd
images. Would it be better to liken it to a tree, even though
the buildings along this road scarcely allow any tree, or
plant life, unusual when all of Central London has its fair
share of squares, gardens, parks… and trees? Of course,
a few days later when walking up the road, I notice a number
on checking, isolated plane trees set in the pavement, some
pretty large ones too.

A
tree with its branches and roots will not feed me here.
Perhaps a tree within
is what I’m pursuing. “The tree which impales my throat has sprouted
and pushed from my stomach,” Bernard Noël impresses in one of his
earlier poems. “It climbs right into my nostrils.”

Certainly
I should stick with culture, because it’s culture that has been my lifeblood, that this
street represents as my lifeline. Something more modern would
be the idea of a collage. Let’s relate Charing Cross
Road and its environs as a collage, an assemblage. Perhaps
Robert Rauschenberg will suffice as a reference. His life’s
work has wound in and out of all forms of collage, much of
it categorized as “combine paintings.” For Rauschenberg
this road itself would probably have provided enough for
a collage, finding things underfoot to make into his work. “Beauty
is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look,” is
how John Cage wrote on his friend’s work. Nothing was
ugly. Strangely, along this street I rarely notice anything
underfoot as I’m too preoccupied with all else. Fortunately
it’s a street where few dogs are taken for strolls,
and thus no need to keep an eye directed downwards. In his
Retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in the late 90s,
Rauschenberg unveiled the first complete showing of his major
work, The 1/4 mile or 2 furlong piece (1981-1997), conceived
as the longest art work in the world, a length which is not
strictly accurate in terms of its title, impossible to measure
as sculptural pieces are incorporated, though it must equate
somewhat with the Charing Cross Road in length, and indeed
in its very nature as collage and experience as a journey.

Like
Rauschenberg’s work, the Charing Cross Road has never
seemed to be a jumble, it always seems to fall into place,
have a compositional form. And
while he, as artist, might not like to exert his influence on his work, to personalize
it, Rauschenberg knows there is no other way. “I know that the artist can’t
help exercising his control to a degree and that he makes all the decisions finally.
But if I can just throw enough obstacles in the way of my own personal taste,
then maybe it won’t be all-controlling, and maybe the picture will turn
out to be more interesting as a result.”

As
a young child my grandma used to take me to Trafalgar Square
to feed the pigeons, followed by afternoon
tea in Lyons Corner House nearby. At least the photographs,
reinforced by family stories, tell me that’s what we
did, as I have absolutely no memory of those events aside
from the images and their impositions as memory. Did we only
go that far? What else did we do? Didn’t we set foot
in the Charing Cross Road? I could ask my sister, she’s
a wealth of information on childhood memories. But I won’t.
I don’t need to remember the forgotten. How bourgeois
to take a trip to London to visit Trafalgar Square, have
tea and cakes, or scones, and then return home. I don’t
believe that was the case. Surely we would have gone to the
zoo, probably by bus… or even taxi, that would have
been my grandma’s sense of style.

Walk,
not ride. Walk. Always that pleasure. Even now. One can
take a bus, or a taxi, or go down into the Underground
and bypass this road, hurtle its length beneath the street.
But I have never done that when my intention was to go
somewhere within easy walking distance. I have always made
it a point
to venture up this road, to feel its life, to relate to
its book culture, or even to aspects that don’t necessarily
interest me. The need is to feel the vibrancy of its life.
Another street will just not do, or, if chosen, it’s
for the exotic nature of the detour, not to experience the
pulse of my life. This street has become an addiction, I
need it as if a fix. Since I was fourteen, or thirteen and
a half (let’s say), I’ve needed this street “to
communicate” with myself, to make me understand the
complexities and confusions of my life, though I cannot say
that I realized that point until I was around nineteen, the
end of my teens. Perhaps not even that early. I had chosen
a college in Chelsea for the start of my “further education,” because
of its image, a sense of “bohemia” I guess – the
Chelsea Set, with their Chelsea boots, those Cuban-heeled
wonders bought from Anello & Davide, the theatrical footwear
shop that once served a few years residence too in the Charing
Cross Road, though I was its customer earlier when it was
not far away in Covent Garden’s Drury Lane. I had also
chosen Soho as another fixed point for its sense of risk
and sexuality – enhanced by its Italian delicatessens,
(my mother came from south of Roma), though probably a
ruse to cover for my sexual awakenings and leanings.

Like
many writers I can only write at home, at my table. Not
in the living room. Not in the bedroom.
Only in my workroom. At my table. It’s as if I’m
only switched on there. Charing Cross Road is much the same.
Not any other street. Just this one particular road that
I can walk up, oblivious to the noise, to anything but what
I want to see, hear, or smell. This street is the writing
table at home that “fortifies this whole need for identity,” as
Morton Feldman suggested in a public conversation with Cage.

My
first recollections of the Charing Cross Road start in
my early teens, when I went to buy a clarinet, and a
year or so later when I exchanged it for an alto
saxophone. Where I went specifically I can’t recall, there are still shops
selling instruments along the road and various roads off. Boosey & Hawkes
used to have their shop a step or two away in Shaftesbury Avenue, I recall
it well. The windows were always a lure. Today I still pause before window
displays
to look at those gleaming instruments, particularly saxophones, amazed at their
prices, wondering how I must have saved for mine in my teens, as they would
have been as high in comparison even then.

Charing
Cross Road is like a jazz solo too. I think of Johnny Dyani,
his authoritative bass on the album
Fruits with Leo Smith and Phillip Wilson always a pleasure
to hear, sending tingles up and down my spine, setting my
body alive, woozing my head into worlds of desire. Why that
album rather than another by Cannonball Adderley or John
Coltrane, both early influences and sources for inspiration?
Coltrane’s Tunji plays in my head even now, at the
flick of a memory. Those albums are still downstairs in the
bulging collection of vinyl, never to be replaced, even though
CDs fill the new shelving. It was in Charing Cross Road too
that I used to come to buy my jazz albums, in Dobell’s
at number 77, the whole block erased today and replaced with
a modern arcade. Or not to buy, more particularly to leaf
through the covers, read the sleeve notes, and dream of having
enough money to purchase them. My list would be drawn from
the jazz magazines or the foreign radio stations (usually
French) I tuned into through the fields of static. I used
to hang around those wooden racks, listening to the jazz
played in the shop, listening to people talking knowledgeably
on the music, eavesdropping and feeling part of “the
happening scene.” That shop has long gone, moved some
years ago to another street, then vanished. But at least
Ray’s in Shaftesbury Avenue is only a quick blow, a
stone’s throw away, a shop that still has an earthy
feel. (It too has moved, into Charing Cross Road, in-house
at the new-look Foyle’s.) If one wants slickness and
absence of passion, one goes along Oxford Street, to Virgin,
HMV or others, the big megastores that supply everything,
or so they say. Better to go the opposite way into Covent
Garden and find the cellar store, Rough Trade, with its highly
selective choice of the ignored and avant-garde. Better to
support independent ventures in the face of the corporate
monsters. (Rough Trade too has moved, much further east,
to the trendiness of the Brick Lane area.)

A
street of music, a jazz solo winding through all that I
stand for, the pivot on improvisation in all the
arts. Did I aspire to become a musician? I don’t think
so. I knew I would never achieve that. Nothing to do with
feel, more to do with support I suspect. Unlike any apprenticeship
at writing, a silent pursuit in a corner, or beneath the
bed sheets, learning to play a musical instrument is a noisy
affair that can attract the wrath and discouragement of others:
family or neighbours. Today I see a different support system
in this house, watching our girls progress on their journey
with flute and violin, visibly encouraged to learn and enjoy.

Music
is a pleasure. It is at the heart of all I do. It is my
blood flow, the glow at the core of my existence
ever since I reached my teens and, with a couple
of others, formed a jazz club at school to while away our lunch breaks in ecstasy,
or as near as one could get to paradise in a Catholic grammar school.

Jazz
is the root of my music interests. Whether I detour into
rock or classical, free form or ethnic,
it’s jazz that lies behind it. So what do I mean by
jazz? Do I mean jazz? Or do I mean improvisation? I know
that improvisation is found in other musics – Indian,
baroque, church organ, and more – but it was with jazz
that it came into my world and where it still holds its strength.
Improvisation is the form that fits all my interests in the
arts, that guides my way, whether working with chords, chromatic
scales, acrostics, chopsticks or pieces of eight. Always
that notion to weave from a source, to flow, to give 100%
at the moment of creation, placing the material in the furnace
and, like the alchemist, producing gold, or at least the
aspiration to do just that.

It
seems no mistake, or slip of the tongue, that Dyani flowed
first from my pen. If I was ever to pursue a course in
music I’m sure somewhere along the
process I would have taken the bass line, would have wanted to be a bass player,
albeit an inventive bass player, like Dyani, or Jimmy Garrison, or Charlie Mingus,
of course. Or, on the rock platform, someone like John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin),
or Tony Levin (King Crimson). A few examples only, good ones though. Inventive
would be the condition. Or if it was to remain around the saxophone, that aspect
to be found with the bass clarinet as played by Eric Dolphy, or even the baritone
sax as first heard by Gerry Mulligan. Those bass sounds have always resounded
deep within me, have always pulsed irredeemably, still do. And now I know why
I kept away from them, standing before the musical instruments on display, looking
at the prohibitive prices, knowing they are out of my reach, always were, always
would have been… dreaming aside.

Great
Newport Street first came to my attention as a jazz home
for Ken Colyer’s Studio 51. Not that
I favoured that form of New Orleans “Trad Jazz,” but
I was aware, each time I walked past, a few yards away in
Charing Cross Road, that jazz was played there. I did get
to visit it later when a friend of mine, the poet Pete Brown,
formed a band, one of many, that included the then session
musician who went on to greater heights, Johnny McLaughlin.
The string of guitarists who moved through the guitar spot,
Chris Spedding, Jim Mullen… has to be compared with
the blues breaker bands of John Mayall and his appetite and
breeding ground for a profusion of today’s celebrated
rock blues guitarists.

Studio
51 was to catch my eye a few years ago when I came across
Patrice Chaplin’s
book, Albany Park, (the side of Sidcup that borders on where we live) and discovered
that she grew up a couple of streets from where I’m now sitting at my desk.
Her story plots the course of an escape from the suburbs to the wider world,
via early trips to London to visit Studio 51 and other nearby jazz haunts and
all-night cafés around Soho. Later she was to venture to America, to the
West Coast, and marry – into the famous film family whose surname she now
bears.

More
in keeping with my mood was Ronnie Scott’s, at that time in a basement in Gerrard Street,
just behind the Charing Cross Road, off to the left. Again
I was too young to visit the club, and the knowledge that
it was in Chinatown didn’t help. Any image of Soho,
no matter how sordid, I have always felt comfortable with,
but all images of Chinatown always spooked me in those days,
perhaps still do to some degree. When Ronnie Scott moved
his club a few hundred yards north across Shaftesbury Avenue
into Soho itself, and when I was older, then it seems it
was possible to pay a visit – though as it grew and
became famous, even distinguished, my tastes in jazz went
more towards the avant-garde, the breed of modern jazz musicians
they wouldn’t feature – or even into a “free
music” that didn’t qualify as jazz in many eyes.
Or even within its own eyes.

I
don’t think I really did aspire to or dream of a
life in music. Though I must have had some presence or
sense of interest, for once I had left home
and was working in the area, I used to regularly bump into Tommie Connor, a songwriter
of the old school, one of those famous for penning early “popular songs” like
Never Do A Tango With An Eskimo, or I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa
Claus. His son
was at school with me, we shared similar jazz interests. Yet over all the years
I almost never saw his father at home, only at Mass on Sunday mornings taking
the plate around for the collection. It wasn’t until those years later,
when I was in the area daily that I used to bump into him going to and fro to
Denmark Street, the original Tin Pan Alley, directly off Charing Cross Road,
just short of Oxford Street. Even when “pop music” was not long under
way, like the early days of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to name the obvious,
it used to be along that street that the music business thrived. Mr Connor worked
in Denmark Street, one of those who had an office where he would sit at the piano
and write songs. He was under contract to a music publisher, the street was full
of them. In the basements were small recording studios where they would demo
the songs. Or even make records. The Rolling Stones famously recorded Not
Fade Away in the basement at Number 4 with Phil Spector and Gene Pitney in attendance.
Today most aspects of the business have gone, though shops selling instruments
or sheet music survive, and even the only music bookshop in London, Helter Skelter,
has taken fairly solid roots there it would seem. (Again, another casualty,
no longer a retail outlet, but a publishing venture.)

“Hello son,” I can hear Tommie
saying, or Mr Connor as I always called him with respect.
And I can also hear his repeated words of advice, as he knew
or sensed the arts were becoming my ground, perhaps my livelihood,
not to go into the music world. Not that he had been unsuccessful.
The nicest father figure I’ve ever met. Someone special
to me. Still fresh in my mind. That kindly little man who
always treated me too with respect, always offered a smile
and warmth of greeting, followed by a routine of polite questions
before we spoke on other matters, never omitting the warning
that I should avoid the music business. I understood.

Charing
Cross Road has always been a street where people in the
music business could be seen walking, whether to
Denmark Street, or elsewhere. Even today, though
what business they have can only be guessed at. But through the Sixties and Seventies
heads always turned when someone like Hendrix in his multi-coloured clothes would
pass along, en route for somewhere. One famous occasion, in June 1967, at the
Saville Theatre, now a cinema complex, just round the corner in Shaftesbury Avenue,
is fixed in music mythology, for Hendrix opened his Sunday night set with the
title track of Sergeant Pepper, to everyone’s amazement, including the
Beatles, also in the audience. The album had only been released the previous
Thursday. Where had he heard it? Pre-release copies then were not prevalent or
such a hype-ridden strategy manoeuvre as now. Most didn’t hear an album
until release date, even those in the business. Perhaps Hendrix had heard it
at UFO, the famous underground club, just off the top end of the road, the hippy
club where all the great rock musicians used to pass through Friday nights, and
where the album would have been played on the sound system between live sets.
Not would have been, but was, I was there. Like many a major album it was played
straight through. Hendrix only needed to hear something once to absorb it for
future use.

Or Frank Zappa, who could pass by unnoticed
to most of the population, at least as an unrecognizable
face, though as most of our generation looked so different
in those days from the general flow of people, heads would
have turned regardless. Talking about our generation.

Today
there are other venues in and around the street, mainly
clubs and bars, but the Astoria at the top end is the only
rock venue of any size. It’s
still known as The Jam Factory, after its initial site as a preserves factory
more than a century ago. Litchfield Street, further south, has suffered a more
recent loss. The famous folk cellar, Bunjies, where many a folk artist carved
out their career, cramped in that grimy place, has gone. Now there is little
reason to pass along this short street, unless to reach The Ivy, the fashionable
restaurant at its far end where the glitterati of rock, film and media dine,
marked by the paparazzi who hang around outside day and night with their cameras
dangling. It’s more important these days to be famous, to be a celebrity,
than to be a master of your art. Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame reduced
to five, at best.

Earlier,
before I worked in the street, when I was at college, I
found myself attached to it as another
world of dreams opened. One that was an expediency for me,
financial remunerations, rather than a reality or long-term
course. I had been approached by a woman who looked incredibly
like Sophia Loren. She wanted me to model for her agency,
the Marjorie Jones agency, which had its office just off
to the right at the end of Charing Cross Road, along William
IV Street. At college I had not been aware of many, or perhaps
any, gay men, but now I was faced by a room occupied by gay
male models. My preference was always female and I tended
to veer into their room when I was passing through. I started
my part-time occupation at the same time as another who was
there briefly before moving on, one who came to fame on the
silver screen: Charlotte Rampling. Neither of our destinies
tallied with notions to be models. In my short stay I was
offered free hairdressing, and used to go along to one of
the best, Robert James, who had a little salon upstairs in
an alleyway opposite Studio 51, on the other side of Charing
Cross Road, an alleyway that led to Chinatown. But having
one’s hair cut too frequently seemed to remove it faster
than it grew. It became short, too short for my liking. I
felt a draught and decided enough was enough, I wanted my
hair back, so I held on to it fast. From that day I’ve
never stepped inside a hairdresser, though for many years
I saw photos of myself extracted from a hairdressing magazine
and stuck in their windows.

I
did meet one of the models years later, on the arm of a
rock musician I knew. But it wasn’t
long before I became confused and lost track of names to
know if some of those who graced the magazine pages were
girls I had seen undressing before me in that room at the
agency. I guess I can’t remember their faces, my eyes
filled with other distractions.

Dreams of music, dreams of modelling. No. Just things that
came along. Though
I’ve been lucky to have found involvement in the music world throughout
my life.

My real introduction to the Charing Cross
Road as a daily occurrence came when I took an early job
in an office in Leicester Square, each lunchtime escaping
around the corner to the Charing Cross Road to browse in
its bookshops, and often to eat in a small Italian place
that served an abundance of bolognese, right on the slip
road, Moor Street, that was part of Cambridge Circus. As
it was so filling, sometimes I elected to skip lunch, and
just go browsing, grab a sandwich instead.

Going
a step further I soon determined I would much prefer to
work in a bookshop, and, as far as the Charing Cross
Road was concerned, that meant Better Books,
which was more like an Arts Centre, given that there were benches for people
to sit and read, a coffee machine, the start of the swish coffee bar fad that
has now become a regular and obvious addition for some of today’s chain
bookstores. Way back in 1967 a drinks facility was more of a primitive affair.
But they were good times. My fellow workers were all poets: Bob Cobbing, Lee
Harwood, Anthony Barnett, Paul Selby…Our visitors, as much visitors as
customers, were poets, writers, artists, and all manner of celebrities, or as
they were then called: famous people. The shop was more than a shop. During my
period there, downstairs, in a fairly squalid and damp cellar, theatre events
occurred. Or, more precisely, Jeff Nuttall’s People Show more or less started
its long and illustrious history right there. The People Show was the most extreme
form of fringe theatre, what many might term Performance Art. Or perhaps better
described as sculptural happenings, a collage of juxtapositions set off by a
box of verbal fireworks. It was certainly true underground theatre. There I witnessed
shows that were a total assault on all the senses. There I saw Laura Gilbert
hanging upside down from a meat hook, suspended next to the whole side of a cow
that had been strung up for a few days, left to fester and rot and smell unbearably,
perhaps even to achieve a maggoty state by the end of the few days the show would
last. A Nice Quiet Night was its title. Laura was hanging from the rafters, distraught,
wracked with tears, baited by Mark Long and John Darling, until a member of the
audience tried to intercede and confront the pair, insisting they take her down
as her terror was for real, nothing to do with acting. Mark and John turned on
this man, a well-known psychiatrist, and berated him for interfering. Who said
this was about acting? This group tested those grounds between theatre and art
activities, performers as creators, improvisers. Or another show entitled Golden
Slumbers with Laura walking around naked, except for black fishnet stockings
and a rose taped high on her navel, besieging Syd Palmer, who lay in a bed, self-obsessed,
playing with himself beneath the sheet, desirous to join him, while Mark and
John stuck their heads through a backdrop and added comments. Memories, images,
that have never left me. The words might have gone, but the visuals remain clear
before my eyes, whether wide open, or closed shut. Today Nuttall’s visible
presence is clear for all to see, larger than life, acting in films like Peter
Greenaway’s The Baby of Macon… (even though Jeff himself has
more recently left this mortal coil.)

Or
poetry readings in the shop, where we drew curtains across
the shelves to prevent excessive stealing. Stealing was
rife from the professionals. No matter
how hard we watched them during the day they always managed to secrete the books,
art books particularly, under their coats as they turned and made for the front
door. We couldn’t challenge them unless we had proof. Occasionally one
of us would walk round to the door if we suspected a professional at work and
stand there in an attempt to discourage them, to let them know we were wise to
their activity, the gauntlet thrown down for them to take the risk of being confronted.
Many still accomplished their task. Checking the shelves after their departure
one could not believe a book could still be missing despite close scrutiny. The
poets were the most incompetent book thieves, or “borrowers” as one
told me some years later. We watched them clumsily sticking books away in a bag,
or beneath their jackets. If only they had asked, they would have received a
good deal. Many another poet or artist, David Medalla for example, would spend
their day seated on a bench, or even find a space at a table in one of the rooms,
reading and making notes as if in a regular library, and then appear with a volume
and ask if we had a less expensive shop-soiled copy of the same. For some reason
we used to find just such a copy on the floor at our feet with a slight mark
as if a foot had been placed on it. Not worth its price, now. Sold. Or Heathcote
Williams who used to appear periodically a few minutes before closing, whisk
around the shelves collecting together a pile of books, place them high on the
counter, fifteen minutes after closing time. Bob would glance at the pile, then
at his watch, no time left to work out the true total and nominate a rough estimate – with
an atrociously bad sense of addition – and Heathcote would leave to devour
another trove of earthly delights. Arts patronage at its best.

I
did meet one of the models years later, on the arm of a
rock musician I knew.
But it wasn’t long before I became confused and lost track of names to
know if some of those who graced the magazine pages were girls I had seen undressing
before me in that room at the agency. I guess I can’t remember their
faces, my eyes filled with other distractions.

Dreams
of music, dreams of modelling. No. Just things that came
along. Though
I’ve been lucky to have found involvement in the music world throughout
my life.

We
stayed open later than others. 6.30 if no evening event.
Opened later in the morning, 10.30. Other
shops were strictly 9 to 5. On Friday nights I worked at
UFO, the club at the top of the street, along Tottenham
Court Road. We strove to stay open most of the night, pushing
on
until everyone was dead on their feet. I used to depart
around 5 on Saturday morning, observing the remains of the
audience
collapsed in corners until the public transport started.
For me it was a matter of walking down the road and, keys
in hand, entering Better Books to stretch out on a bench
and snooze until the others arrived just before 10.30.
Fairly often I’d be woken by a policeman tapping on
the window to ascertain why I was asleep on a bench at 7
or 8 in the
morning.

Other
memories of the shop come and go. Customers like the actor
James Coburn, who was wary that
we should know our
stock instead of crossing to check the shelves
for 50 poems by e.e.cummings. Or Belmondo, wary that we recognized him at all.
Or Burroughs who announced himself: “I’m William Burroughs,” before
asking, “have you…” Or Francis Bacon, never prepared to look
for himself, always asking us to search and fetch.

There
I first met the French poet Claude Royet-Journoud. I can
still see him leaning across the counter, smiling
and introducing himself. With Anne-Marie
Albiach beside him, and her abundance of black hair, buoyant and flowing, a fine “sumptuous” head
of hair that weaves into her texts, that she later talked about with regard to
her family’s view of being shamed by her hair.

Or
the American poet Jerome Rothenberg bringing in copies
of Some/thing magazine, or early David Antin books, and
placing them as little piles on the centre table.
No sooner had he left than we determined we each needed our own copy, and another
for someone else… and before we knew it the pile had disappeared, so that
an hour later when a customer arrived in search of copies that Jerome had just told him had been left there, we had to inform him that we were already sold
out. Today’s hot item. Those were the days. Copies of rare books brought
in from abroad, Warhol catalogues, and so many small press editions… countless
put aside for staff or friends. A day off risked missing out on what would later
become a treasure. That’s the delight of having a literary staff in the
shop. Always a pleasure, as last week, to find an assistant in a bookshop with
some knowledge that enables an informed conversation on a book or author. All
is not lost today, even if it seems so quite frequently.

When
our wing of the shop was closing down, the cream being
folded back into the more traditional sections
of the shop next door, I bought up or removed some of the
remaining copies of magazines like Kulchur, bringing a borrowed
car in one Sunday to take away a handful of boxes. I was
instructed to do that, otherwise loads of rare items would
just be junked. As I understood it, the owners, Collins the
publishers, were closing us down because we were losing money,
or not making enough profit (their role as unwitting arts
patrons was obviously not appreciated), though they hinged
their decision on a contentious point by stating they disliked
the prominence given to Burroughs or his Naked Lunch. They
did not want his conspicuous promotion. It offended their
religious convictions. Of course, once they had disposed
of the thriving but nasty avant-garde aspect to their shop,
they sold Burroughs’ books like any other. Why turn
away sales? The shop that remained under the illusion that
it was Better Books never recovered, even though it limped
on in one form or another for some years. All the loyal customers
transferred their allegiance to Barry Miles’ Indica
not far away in Southampton Row, and later northwards to
Compendium in what was at that time a peripheral area of
London called Camden Town.

From Better Books one would take walks through Soho, directly
opposite, along Old Compton Street, where the prostitutes
either stood in doorways or switched
on the red lights in their windows. A little further and one reached Brewer Street,
climbed the stairs behind the Italian deli, and entered John Calder’s offices
to collect books. One time I went to buy Beckett’s More Pricks Than
Kicks,
three of the 100 copies directed my way, one for myself, two for friends, Beckett
having been persuaded initially to allow a mimeographed re-edition for scholars.

Soho is not the same any longer. A haven of gay bars, a profusion of cafés
that pour onto the sidewalk, Continental style. There is also an abundance of
rubber and leather shops, suitable for all persuasions, such that the prostitutes
who do still seem to ply their trade conspicuously now appear as the milder side
of sleaze. What is sleazier is found right on the Charing Cross Road itself,
as indeed elsewhere in central London where telephone boxes are plastered with “calling
cards” for all manner of prostitutes, transvestites and transsexuals. No
sooner does a council official clear a booth of the “infestation” than
the young men return with their blue tack and cards, relining the walls and windows
with the array of flesh on offer. Taken individually the images seem lurid but
innocuous, though when one is confronted by a bank of a hundred or more on all
sides it’s not so easy to hold a conversation with one’s dear old
aunt, or discuss any amount of delicate matters with anyone but an intimate friend.

I
was fortunate to find my feet in London, to find a bookshop
to work in that gave me that first step
into the world I wanted to enter. And even for that step
to be on the Charing Cross Road. One of those who lead me
into this world was Colin Wilson. In my teens I had discovered
his book, Adrift in Soho, in the local library. It was that
title with that salacious word, “Soho,” with
its implications and propositions, that had made me pluck
it from the shelf. Reading again a copy that I later acquired,
I note the pub opposite Better Books, Molly Moggs, on the
corner of Old Compton Street was one of the first places
at which Wilson’s hero stopped, when he descended on
the great metropolis in the Fifties, in search of another
world, a more cultured and intelligent world. Dispirited
and annoyed at his lack of contact with others in what he
thought would be some form of instant acceptability of himself
as another outsider welcomed into the ranks, he adds: “The
whole city was a part of the great unconscious conspiracy
of matter to make you feel non-existent.” But Colin
Wilson had a presence in my life. That novel led me to The
Outsider, and the pursuit of his various references, through
Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, etc, each leading me to further
paths, avenues, alleyways, fields, vistas, opening up a world
map itself, a personal labyrinth, a paradise to my imagination.
His books had a considerable part to play in determining
my direction in life, no matter what I might have subsequently
thought or determined about any of his books. At that point
they were crucial as catalysts.

Always other bookshops to go into, then as now.
Today there are some of the big bookchains like Borders and
Waterstones
asserting themselves in the street, while
others like Foyle’s and the second-hand shops seem to survive, some under
different owners, alongside the bookshops where the reviewers’ copies and
the remaindered excess from publishers are off-loaded – with their bargains
for the discerning buyer among the best-sellers which didn’t happen. Other
favoured shops like Henry Pordes remain with memories of treasures discovered
there, particularly art books. Beuys drawings spring to mind. Or various Tàpies
volumes. And close at hand the women’s bookshop, Silver Moon, where once
one felt positively discouraged from entering, but now where they seem desperate
for customers, the flash mega-bookshops like Borders and Waterstones draining
away all business. And yet Zwemmer, the art bookshop, somehow manages to survive
miraculously. (Also to note, Silver Moon’s recent absorption into the Foyle’s
emporium and Zwemmer’s renewal in the form of a Koënig wonderland.)

When I ask others, not only writers, what street they would be drawn to in London,
or cite as their major thoroughfare, they invariably say Charing Cross Road.
Perhaps they see their own stories along it. But I wonder how many see it as
a street of dreams, a street of hopes and aspirations, like me? All are people
who have a sense of culture, obviously, as this is nothing if not a street of
culture. It helps too if they are people who still read, not those who used to
read in their youth, and who now have little time, as they would see it, their
families and jobs having swallowed their days whole. Thus, while some show signs
of nostalgia as a result and can still venture along this road, albeit not so
frequently, others seem cloaked with jealousy for those who can, or who have
benefited from familiarization with it.

Literary
memories. Taking my friend Mitsou Ronat, on a brief trip
to London, around for the day. After
visiting art galleries, walking the length of this road en
route to eat near Cecil Court, a passageway off, crammed
with second-hand and rare editions bookshops, including Watkins,
the occult specialists, famous for steering clear of Crowley
(who was catered for in Atlantis Bookshop near the British
Museum). Pausing with Mitsou before the window of a shop
of theatrical nostalgia, laughing before the displayed original
poster for the film, Trapeze, one of her favourites,
triple somersaults across the mind’s arena, and other
gymnastic manoeuvres. Hard to walk that passage today without
a flood
of fond memories for my friend killed so tragically. I try
to switch the subject, focus on the variety of other windows,
including an Italian bookshop, one of the very few languages
to have its own London outlet, rather than the more general
foreign bookshops that exist, countable on one hand.

Another memory, a more recent one, when Pierre Guyotat came
to London to promote the English-language edition of Eden
Eden Eden, shaped as a double-handed event
with one strand as an exhibition of his books and manuscripts at number 142,
a building my neighbour tells me had seen better, or other, days when he had
worked as an architect on the top floor, with an escort agency below, a cover
term for other activities, and a drinking club on the first floor, a home to
less savoury characters, the haunt of gangsters and other known “faces,” the
Kray Brothers included he suggested. It must have been on that floor, abandoned
to decay, then reclaimed for use as an artist’s studio, that Guyotat exhibited
his texts and books. The other part of the event took place a few doors further
away, where Guyotat staged a reading before a packed and standing hip audience
in another abandoned and decaying space dominated by a splendid wooden staircase.
A memorable night, not only for his vocalization of a recent text, but for the
office hand from the publishers who, in a drunken stupor, clambered onto the
platform and halted the proceedings, insisting Guyotat remove himself from the
stage and the translator step up to read from the just-published book in English.
At the back it was impossible to ascertain what was happening. Why those at the
front didn’t halt the debacle I’ve never really known. Guyotat was
probably too shocked to refuse to move or to know how to handle the situation.
That unpleasant outcome features as one of the most shameful literary moments
I’ve ever witnessed. Foyle’s was famous for its accumulation of stock, no clearance sales, back
stock that became lost among its shelves, no stock taking, where you could find
volumes long out of print at the original prices. Also a dream outlet for small
and independent publishers who could always send in a rep to top up on stock,
deliver them in the afternoon with a bill to be paid a few days later, as I knew
only too well when I worked for Fulcrum Press directly after Better Books. Foyle’s
has saved many a cash flow problem. But now I gather it’s changing, heading
to join, or perhaps combat, the fold peddling the latest “products” for
a quick turn over.

Foyle’s has always suggested an old world of quaintness, dominated by its
owner, an old lady who refused to bring it up to date with modern practices and
technology. That might have been true, but with its chaotic organization, and
perhaps because of its low pay practices, members of staff had other ways to
provide a more clandestine reputation, a reputation of enjoyment. Stories have
abounded of drunken lunch-hours or after-hours sprees for some years. In the
early Nineties when I was friendly with various members of staff, I would drop
in on passing and hear about the sexual activities that occurred in darkened
corners, in cupboards, or under the stairs, let alone in the toilets. On more
than one occasion I walked smack into couples half-perched on the edge of their
pleasures. While these escapades might have been unseen by the late owner, other
long-serving female members of her higher echelon were adept at turning a blind
eye, remarking that it was just young people having fun, no different from in
their youth. Lines of cocaine along the counter probably didn’t strike
home.

Foyle’s helped to brand Charing Cross
Road as a bookshop road. Another was number 84, where Marks & Co
once resided, the shop to which Helene Hanff commenced writing
her letters in 1949, the correspondence becoming the basis
of her book, 84 Charing Cross Road. My sister-in-law loans
me her copy when I find it on her shelves. I browse and become
charmed like anyone would at the story unfolding. This edition
is a double book, the sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury
Street,
added, in which Helene comes to London in 1971 to realize
her dream, including a visit to the now closed 84, “black
and empty,” and upstairs “another floor of empty,
haunted rooms.” Her memories unroll mine. To open the
door they call at 86, the bookshop next door: Poole’s.
I had all but forgotten it myself, indeed thinking, without
thinking, that they were one and the same. They were not.
Poole’s. Next door to the original Better Books. A
shop where I made other friends in the following years, the
late 70s, one of whom I saw only yesterday, working further
down the road in Zwemmer. Memories pile over one another
as they crash through my head. All can be aligned. Books,
magazines, those friends own involvements and writings all
enmeshed in this house, all here to be untangled: if and
when.

All the bookshops have risen and fallen over the years I’ve
been walking back and forth along the road. At different
times I have frequented one more
than another, either because of interest changes on my part, or because ownership
and management changes on their part have varied the stock and attitudes. But
this road has always been a road that one cannot keep away from. Any break of
a few months and one notices the absence through its changes.

Browsing in these shops, edging one’s way down shaky wooden stairs into
musty basements, one is always prepared to find a fellow scribe in the corner
enjoying its pleasures. More than once I’ve caught that chronicler and
celebrant of London, Iain Sinclair, between the pages of a book. Besides creating
a different picture of London in his own books, painting an alternative aesthetic
of the metropolis that brings together rare connections between people and places,
facts and ideas, for years Sinclair has had an occupation, and preoccupation,
with buying and selling books, maintained via a catalogue. And like the best
catalogues it’s not just an alphabetical listing of delights, but a carefully
detailized and informed work in itself. A dealer who knows and cares about the
books. A dealer who has rescued books from discarded corners and brought them
into the light, offering them for the reader and collector who has an equal passion
for rescuing books. I’ll refrain from reiterating Walter Benjamin’s
famous essay on collecting with regard to such matters. For the book collector
the Charing Cross Road is an extension of his own bookshelves, where each volume
is cared for, where each tome is treated with the love and attention the poet
gives to each word during writing.

Today,
for me, each bookshop is like a bookcase when I’m standing outside it. Each offers memories,
interests and obsessions. Even reading up the building is
like casting one’s eye up a bookcase, looking for something
on the top shelf, cornices or balustrades, a twist like a
turn of phase.

The regular fare of most book catalogues, cryptically-listed
catalogues that drop through the letterbox, are often akin
to the modern bookshop. They will
always hold delights, but rarely a sense of adventure. Catalogues, like Sinclair’s,
are sumptuous, are like the old bookshop where one knows instinctively as one
opens the door whether it is likely to offer something sought after, or worth
seeking, something to take one off in a different direction, a little detour,
an added bonus.

Even when accompanied by our children today we still find reason to walk up the
Charing Cross Road rather than take other routes if our destination is close
at hand. The girls might not yet have the habit to browse at length in bookshops,
though they are not averse to entering them and acquiring more books, a pile
growing in our arms in a short space of time, but the idea is planted that this
road is the centre of the universe, or virtually. The idea is established that
the physicality of looking at and feeling books is more important than any computer
screen versions. Or indeed that the smell of slightly musty books is the smell
that all good homes are perfumed with, as well as the best bookshops.

The girls must notice how acceptable it is to part with hard-earned money to
buy books when reluctance settles in with regard to other goods. One day, some
years ago, we leave the Charing Cross Road and cross through Soho to reach that
mock Tudor façade that is Liberty’s, an expensive department shop,
famous for its own brand of prints, fabrics, silks and scarves. Always worth
a browse during the “sales” periods. For fun, or to dream, Catherine
looks in the “designer” fashion section, browsing the Vivienne Westwoods,
Nicole Farhis, and others, until Elise, the elder, notices a price tag, albeit
a reduced sales price. And then another. She asks me to equate its price to other
things. I compare it to a video recorder, food for more than two months, a tower
of children’s books and other such practical realities. Edging close to
her mother she whispers that it’s time to move on. Why? She wants to move
to another department, or preferably another shop. Why? “You’re just
looking,” she stresses. “Just looking.” Now it’s a joke
every time we plan a trip into the centre of London. “Just looking,” we
are reminded if a whiff of Liberty’s is caught on the wind, or our breath.
There are other things to spend such a sum of money on, of course. Books. Records.
For a start.

In
the new strip where Dobell’s once
resided, and where the rents must be high, against all the
odds, I would have thought, a bookshop, Murder One, has managed
to find its feet. (To add that it has now crossed the
road into more reasonable premises.) Murder One is the main specialist
in crime fiction in the country, a venue where many a writer
would be pleased to do a signing or hold a book launch. A
few years ago I was passing and popped in to see friends.
It should have been closed, but it was the night for the
launch of Walter Mosley’s first book. He was already
acclaimed in America, but had not yet caught on here. Bill
Clinton had not proclaimed him his favourite writer at that
point. There was no one there, even though it was past the
prescribed time. Not even the publisher’s entourage
in attendance. Just Mosley and myself. We talked for what
seemed a good hour, until we were dry. Literally, for I don’t
think there was any drink at that point. Finally the publishers
arrived, and one or two friends of friends appeared. How
different a year or two later. Not that a celebrated name
necessarily means a packed shop.

When
Robin Cook (aka Derek Raymond) had returned from France
in the early 90s, his own view on London
crime finally finding its audience in his homeland, he was
always to be located just behind the Charing Cross Road,
in Soho, frequenting the two haunts that have long been watering
holes for writers: the French House and the Coach & Horses.
The Coach & Horses is almost on the Charing Cross Road,
the French House, often called The French, a few steps further.
The latter has a reputation, being the bar where General
de Gaulle, Maurice Chevalier and other French people used
to drink during the war days. Unlike comparable French establishments,
you are more likely to be crammed in, standing room only,
not seated at tables. This isn’t Paris. These are the
two regular bars one retreats to with anyone you meet in
the street. Or if alcohol is not the menu, then two equally
cramped pâtisserie homes have been in existence for
years, one called Pâtisserie Valerie, the other, Maison
Bertaux. Both have illustrious reputations for morning or
afternoon coffees and delicious cakes.

How sad to bump into a friend coming from
Maison Bertaux recently, bouncing with
joy, a wide smile. “Good news,” I asked, thinking perhaps he had
found a publisher for his book. “No,” he responded. “I’ve
just had the most exquisite cake. It was so good, it was better than sex.”

Little drinking clubs, often exclusive, or where one can bluff one’s way
in if one looks the part, whether the Groucho Club, or basement bars hidden behind
solid wooden doors whose bell one rings to enter. Or places to eat, so many places,
of all types, spilling here in Soho or off all the roads these days. And indeed
on the Charing Cross Road. Many are run of the mill, parts of chains, but there
are still some that have existed for ever, such as the little Greek place in
the southern part of the road, near Cecil Court, that was always a reasonable
place for a bite many years ago before today’s profusion came into being.
Today too, in shops like Borders, after browsing the books, one can drink a coffee
of one’s choosing, a proper cup of coffee, not the “instant” variety
in white plastic cups still trafficked in many other quarters.

Philip Corner, when talking about playing some of John Cage’s “prepared
piano pieces,” notes that while one could follow the instructions of the
precise dimensions of the bolts and the exact positions to place them, the sound
that was supposed to be produced wasn’t always so, suggesting that one
had to choose between “the specificity of the position or try to get the
sound,” because, at the time they were written, most of the performers
of the pieces were practicing and experimenting on “beat up” pianos
at home and working on different ones in concert. I think of that in terms of
walking up and down the street, trying to say what one will see, what I saw,
what I felt, as if trying to make a game plan for others. As if a score to be
performed by others. Is that what we do? I think of this now because out of the
blue I hear from Philip Corner after twenty or more years, today relocated from
New York to Northern Italy, pleased to rediscover me via a friend, hoping that
we can meet if it works out that he comes to London in the near future. Now that
I’m living within the encompass of London once more I know we can meet
this time. I think it’ll be in the Charing Cross Road. It usually is employed
as a base for my meetings with others. But where? The coffee bar at Borders is
the favoured place these days, allowing one to browse in books or records to
give flexibility to the meeting time. Or should I chose somewhere else, something
more representative of our relationship? Record shops, bookshops, the National
Gallery slide through my mind. Nothing sticks. Before I would have come up with
something suitable. Now it’s not so easy. Anything credible is probably
out of the way and liable to cause some confusion locating.

Among
all these bookshops is a cigar shop, G. Smith & Sons, at number 74, that sells not only cigars,
but pipes and all manner of cigarettes. It has been there
since 1869 it proclaims outside. It looks something like
one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, being the only one in
the neighbourhood to retain some of its former look. I’ve
been inside a few times when guests from abroad have sought
their favourite cigarettes and I’ve seen that as a
possible source, successfully as it has turned out.